The To-Be-Read Problem

As I have mentioned countless times on this dear blog of mine, I am a librarian.

(I ALWAYS, without fail, think of Rachel Weiss in The Mummy when I say that)

How I store and manage my book collection is very important to me, I have had them all catalogued for several years now using my own shelf tags which suit the size and range of my collection perfectly. The only problem with this perfectly ordered way of arranging my books is that when I am only trying to read certain books, i.e. the books I have not read/finished/can't remember for my reading challenge, the ones I had read, and love dearly, were sat right next to the ones I was trying to motivate myself to read.

If you lack will power like me I am sure you can guess what kept happening?

All my older books got re-read and my unread ones were left on the shelf.

I came to the conclusion that if I were to ever get them all read I would have to make a change, and I took the plunge and messed up my neatly ordered bookshelves and moved all of the titles I wanted to read as part of the challenge onto one bookcase, the one next to my reading nook.

Anyone who knows me quite well will be fairly shocked about this, and possibly amazed. It is a well known fact that I am a little bit OCD about things, and I have to admit half way through shifting them all I did have a bit of a nervous wobble and contemplate putting them back, especially when I realised they wouldn't all fit (there are books on top of books as in the picture, and also books on top of books on top of books on the very top shelf, not to mention the small pile of extra fat books which is currently on one of the other bookcases).

I have to admit something now though. It's working.

This set of shelves is both right next to my reading nook and my bed, my other bookcases are in the far corner of the room, I haven't even looked at those shelves since I moved these books to this location and I don't particularly miss being able to see them all in order either!

This is all a bit of a revelation for me, but it is a happy one, as I hope it will continue to keep me focussed on my goal.

What about you? Do you keep books you have yet to read separate from your others?